Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  Leaving the dead and injured behind, the British troops then marched on to Concord. After driving off a small group of militiamen, they searched for and found the remaining small store of supplies the colonists had stored there. They were ready to return to Boston. They were tired, they were hungry, and they knew that they had another twenty-one-mile march ahead of them, laden with heavy packs and muskets. What they did not know was that they were about to experience a nightmare.

  A CA. 1776 PRINT of the Battle of Lexington.

  All the way back to Boston, the British were forced to skirmish with companies totaling more than 3,500 militiamen who, after the warnings from Revere, Dawes, and Prescott and the events at Lexington and Concord, had assembled at strategic points along the road in less than twelve hours. Throughout their entire return march, the British were fired upon from houses and from behind trees and fences. Bloodied, exhausted, and humiliated, they finally reached Boston. What had been the first military engagement of what would become a war for independence had resulted in a British disaster.

  As for Warren, as soon as dawn broke on the nineteenth, he left Boston and headed for Lexington. By ten in the morning, he had received news of the happenings on the green and rode as quickly as he could toward the town. Some five miles out he ran into the rear of a column of troops that had been sent out to reinforce the original British forces. He tried to pass around them but was stopped by bayonet-wielding soldiers.

  Fortunately, neither they nor their officers recognized him, and after a long delay he was allowed to move on. His good fortune continued when, at a crossroads, he encountered William Heath, a Patriot with military experience. By this time, because of the delay, the events at Concord had taken place, the troops were on their way back to Boston, and colonial militiamen were scattered about the countryside. Immediately, Warren and Heath began to organize them and to place them in position along the British line of march. At Menotomy (now Arlington), Warren and Heath spurred the militiamen on to delivering the most intense gunfire the troops would encounter in their entire return trip. Warren was almost killed. As the British returned the colonials’ fire, a musket ball came so close to striking his head that it knocked a pin out of the lock of hair that he wore near his ear.

  The man who could not conceive of placing his countrymen in danger without sharing the risks had survived his brush with death, now knowing that he had more work to do than ever. Warren set about organizing and equipping a colonial military force, setting up a makeshift headquarters in Cambridge, and acting as both the president of the Provincial Congress and the head of the Committee of Safety that had been formed to maintain control of the local militias, among other things. On April 21, under his direction, the Committee of Safety voted to raise an army of eight thousand men. Warren wrote an appeal to every Massachusetts city and town:

  We conjure you . . . by all that is dear, by all that is sacred, that you give all assistance possible in forming an army. Our all is at stake, . . . Death and devastation are the certain consequences of delay, every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity, who may survive the carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer it to your country, to your consciences, and above all as you will answer to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means, the enlistment of men to form the army.

  It was an appeal answered not only in the recruitment of men, but in the acquisition of supplies as well. From throughout the colonies, food, gunpowder, and other supplies poured into Massachusetts. Virginia alone sent 8,600 bushels of wheat and corn. George Washington donated what today would amount to more than 10,000 to the cause.

  On June 14, 1775, the Provincial Congress named Warren to serve as a major general in the army he was raising. According to the records of the Congress, “he was proposed as a physician-general; but, preferring a more active and hazardous employment, he accepted a major-general’s commission.” Just three days later Warren would become much more than a military commander in name only.

  Immediately after the events at Lexington and Concord, New England militiamen had taken up positions in the hills surrounding Boston in an attempt to prevent the British troops garrisoned there from carrying out further raids on Massachusetts’s communities. Cooped up within the city, Gage had asked for and received reinforcements from England, including generals John Burgoyne, Henry Clinton, and William Howe. Once they arrived, they decided that their first course of action would be to drive the colonial militia out of the hills. The British leaders’ plan had been barely formulated when their intentions were discovered by spies from the network that Warren had originally established. Immediately, colonial militia dug themselves in on Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula north of Boston.

  WARREN WAS NAMED major general in June 1775.

  At about nine o’clock on the morning of June 17, some 2,200 British troops were ferried across the Charles River and took up positions at the bottom of Breed’s Hill. Hearing that the British had chosen to confront the militiamen on the hill, Warren rode to the site and presented himself as ready for duty. There he was met by General Israel Putnam, who offered Warren command of the militia forces. According to eyewitness Daniel Putnam, Warren replied, “I am here only as a volunteer. I know nothing of your dispositions; nor will I interfere with them. Tell me where I can be most useful.” Putnam then pointed to a redoubt. Warren countered, “Don’t think I come to seek a place of safety, but tell me where the onset will be most furious.”

  In the early afternoon, the British made their first assault on the militiamen entrenched at the top of the hill. Advancing in rigid European-style military formation, they paused only to fire at the colonials who were too far away to be hit. The militiamen, on the other hand, waited until the British were less than thirty yards away from them. Scores of soldiers were killed in the volleys of gunfire that followed. Most of the soldiers who made this first attack were members of the light infantry, the best troops in the British army. Later, their commander, General Howe, when asked to describe how he felt after being forced to retreat, replied by stating that he had “experienced a moment that I never felt before.”

  A NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRINT depicts Joseph Warren (right) before the Battle of Bunker Hill, presenting himself for duty—“where the onset will be most furious”—to General Israel Putnam.

  Once back at the bottom of the hill, the British regrouped and once again marched up the hill. Again they were beaten back; again they suffered devastating losses; again they were forced to retreat. But their commanders were determined that a victory be achieved. For the third time they marched up the hill, where their attack centered on the area in which Warren was situated. By this time the militiamen had only about 150 men left and their ammunition was all but gone. Still they fought on, using guns as clubs and throwing stones at their enemy. Finally, they were forced to retreat. Warren was among the last to leave the redoubt, and a short way down the back of the hill, he was struck in the head by a bullet and instantly killed.

  THE COLONIALS HAD BEEN DRIVEN FROM BREED’S HILL. On paper it was a British victory. In reality, it was anything but that. The toll on the British forces was horrific—226 dead and more than 800 wounded out of the some 2,500 who taken part in a battle that would turn out to be one of the costliest encounters of the entire Revolutionary War. “It was a dear-bought victory,” British general Henry Clinton later wrote; “another such would have ruined us.” And the British had learned an important lesson. Speaking of the courage and discipline the militiamen had demonstrated throughout the bloody confrontation, Gage told Lord Dartmouth in his report that “the trials we have had show the rebels are not the despicable rabble too many thought them to be.”

  The Americans had suffered less than a third of the number of British casualties. But, at the most critical time in their march toward independence, they had lost their leader. Their anguish was intensified when, on
June 23, a statement by British captain Walter Sloan Laurie, the officer in charge of the burial details after the Breed’s Hill battle, was made public. “Doctor Warren, president of the Provincial Congress . . . I found among the slain; and stuffed the scoundrel with another rebel into one hole and there he and his seditious principles may remain.”

  It would be some ten months before the British were driven out of Boston and a search for Warren’s body could be conducted, so that he could be given the dignified interment he deserved. In April 1776, two of Warren’s brothers, aided by a group of friends, were able to scour Breed’s Hill and find and exhume Warren’s corpse. In what may well have been the first example of forensic dentistry in America, positive identification of the body was made by Paul Revere, who had created Warren’s false teeth. Warren was first officially buried in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground. In 1825 his remains were moved to a crypt at St. Paul’s Cathedral before being reinterred in 1855 to the Warren family vault in Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury, his birthplace.

  Warren’s death occasioned an outpouring of tributes. In a letter to her husband, Abigail Adams stated that none of the actions of the British army distressed her as much as did Warren’s death. “We mourn,” she wrote, “for the citizen, the senator, the physician, and the warrior.” John Adams, in a letter to Warren’s brother James, stated, “Our dear Warren has fallen with laurels on his brow as ever graced an hero.” One of the greatest tributes of all came from one of Warren’s staunchest foes. After crediting Warren with extraordinary courage, Thomas Hutchinson stated that “if [Warren] had lived, he bid as fair as any man to advance himself to the summit of political as well as military affairs and to become the Cromwell of North America.”

  The acknowledgments of Warren’s character and contributions continued in the early histories of the new nation that his actions had made possible. William Gordon, author of History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of Independence of the United States of America (1788), said of Warren, “Neither resentment . . . nor interested views, but a regard to the liberties of his country, induced him to oppose the measures of the Government. He stepped forward into public view, not that he might be noted and admired for a patriotic spirit, but because he was a patriot.” Eliot’s Biographical Dictionary (1809) stated simply, “As he lived an ornament to his country, his death reflected a luster upon himself, and the cause he so warmly espoused.”

  THIS COMMEMORATIVE BROADSIDE was printed and sold in Watertown, Massachusetts, soon after Joseph Warren’s death at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The text at the top reads “An elegy, occasion’d by the death of Major-General Joseph Warren, who fell fighting in defence of the glorious cause of his country, at Charlestown, in New England, on the memorable 17th day of June, 1775.”

  Why, then, did this man of such extraordinary accomplishments, a man recognized by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic as so essential to the gaining of American independence, a man who gave his life to the cause in which he so fervently believed, fall into relative obscurity? Why does he remain so unrecognized today? The answer lies in the opening words of Hutchinson’s assessment of his spirited foe: “If [Warren] had lived.” Warren’s role ended before the Declaration of Independence was written, before the United States Constitution was framed, and before a new, free nation was created. It is these events and those associated with them—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin—that have most captured the attention of those interested in the Revolutionary era. Yet it was Warren who made all these events and the achievements of these men possible. It was Warren who, in the words of historian William Tudor, written almost two hundred years ago, was regarded as “the personal representative of those brave citizens, who, with arms hastily collected, sprang from their peaceable homes to resist aggression, and, on the plains of Lexington and heights of Charlestown, cemented with their blood the foundation of American liberty.” The full recognition that is owed Joseph Warren is long overdue.

  FIVE

  OUTDOING REVERE

  History’s Forgotten Riders (1777)

  As Pulitzer Prize–winning author Virginius Dabney wrote, “If you mean to be a historical figure, it is a good idea to get in touch with a leading literary figure—a Longfellow, a Homer, or a Vergil.” As Dabney points out, Paul Revere, Odysseus, and Aeneas “all took this precaution.”

  Dabney was right. As schoolchildren, we all learned of Paul Revere’s ride through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” first published in 1861. What we didn’t learn was that Revere was not the only Patriot to embark upon a midnight ride to raise the alarm of an imminent British attack. What our history books didn’t tell us was that there was not one, but two other of these rides, each more arduous and more dangerous than Revere’s gallop. And what has also been lost to history is that each of those extraordinary endeavors had a greater impact on the American Revolution than the Boston silversmith’s “immortal” achievement.

  The first of these forgotten rides took place in the Long Island Sound region, an area where, from the outbreak of the war, towns in both Connecticut and New York lived in constant fear of an attack by British troops. However, it was not until April 1777 that the long-dreaded attack took place. The site of the assault was Danbury, Connecticut, a town that had become vital to the Patriot cause because of its use as a primary supply depot by the Continental Army. By the spring of 1777, a vast array of provisions was daily being brought into the town. Included in these supplies were clothing, medicine, ammunition, cooking utensils, tents, hospital cots, and foodstuff, including flour, beef, pork, sugar, molasses, coffee, rice, wine, and rum.

  PAUL REVERE’S MIDNIGHT GALLOP, shown here in a ca. 1904 print, has long been regarded as the most vital alarm-spreading ride of the American Revolution. But lost to history has been the fact that two other riders undertook journeys that were longer, more dangerous, and far more important to the Patriot cause.

  Alerted by his spies of the growing importance of Danbury to the colonial rebellion, General William Howe, commander-in-chief of the British Army in America, ordered Major General William Tryon, who also served as New York’s royal governor, to attack Danbury and destroy the supplies located there. On April 24, 1777, twenty transport ships and six war vessels carrying some two thousand troops left New York Harbor and headed for Connecticut’s Compo Beach. Arriving there the next day, the troops disembarked and, in what was to be the largest military engagement in Connecticut during the entire Revolutionary War, began the long march to Danbury.

  James R. Case related how the British conducted their twenty-five-mile march to the unsuspecting and thinly guarded town as if on parade. Describing one of the soldiers, Case wrote: “Upon his head a metallic cap sword-proof, surmounted by a cone, from which a long, chestnut-colored plume fell to his shoulders. Upon the front of the cap was a death’s head, under which was described the words: ‘Or Glory.’ A red coat faced with white, an epaulette on each shoulder, buckskin breeches of a bright yellow, black knee boots and spurs completing the costume. A long sword swung at his side, and a carbine was carried, muzzle down, in a socket at his stirrup. These were models of discipline and military splendor, and mounted on handsome chargers, sixteen hands high.”

  Arriving in Danbury shortly before three in the afternoon, the British found themselves engaged in a number of isolated incidents. In one, a mounted British soldier chased a taunting colonial horseman through the streets but failed to capture him after the townsman unrolled a bolt of cloth he was carrying and frightened the soldier’s horse. In a much more serious incident, four young Danbury men fired into a column of soldiers from the window of the home of one of the town’s leading citizens. Troops then rushed into the house and burned it to the ground, trapping the four young men, who burned to death.

  THIS CA. 1777 MAP of the route of General William Tryon’s expedition to Danbury was prepared by Captain John Montresor, a British military engineer.

  Determined
to discourage any further resistance, the invaders then dragged out the cannon they had brought with them from New York. “As the British troops reached a point near the present location of the court-house,” James Montgomery Bailey wrote, “their artillery was discharged and the heavy balls, six and twelve-pounders, flew screaming up the street, carrying terror to the hearts of the women and children and dismay to the heads of the homes thus endangered.”

  Tryon’s troops then began a systematic house-by-house, building-by-building search for colonial supplies. Those provisions that were found in the homes of supporters of the king were dragged into the street to be burned. The houses of these loyalists, who convinced Tryon that they had been forced to store the supplies, were, however, spared. On the other hand, the homes owned by revolutionaries that were being used as storehouses were, along with their contents, burned to the ground.

  The amount of supplies that were discovered and destroyed was enormous, its magnitude best seen in the official report of the raid sent by Howe to the British government back in England. “In the destruction of the stores at Danbury the village was unavoidably burnt,” Howe reported.

  The list of the material destroyed was as follows: A quantity of ordnance stores, with iron etc; 4000 barrels of beef and pork; 100 large tierces [containers] of biscuits; 89 barrels of rice; 120 puncheons of rum; several large stores of wheat, oats, and Indian corn, in bulk, the quantity hereof could not possibly be ascertained; 30 pipes of wine; 100 hogsheads of sugar; 50 ditto of molasses; 20 cases of coffee; 15 large casks filled with medicines of all kinds; 100 barrels of saltpeter; 1020 tents and marquees; a number of iron boilers; a large quantity of hospital bedding; engineers’, pioneers’ and carpenters’ tools; a printing press complete; tar, tallow, etc; 5000 pairs shoes and stockings.